If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred time, companies that want to succeed today need to understand software coexistence. While IBM and Microsoft and others fight for dominance and talk about "wins" and "win-backs" and that sort of thing, the reality for most companies today is not whether to use one vendor's software or another's, but how to get the software from each vendor to work together. Domino with Exchange, Notes with Sharepoint, anything with Blackberry Enterprise Server, and on and on. Since we switched from being a "rich text tools" only company to providing "coexistence solutions", our growth has been phenomenal. Domino customers use CoexLinks to empower workflow on their Blackberries. Sharepoint or web customers use CoexEdit to empower rich text editing integration with their Domino backends. And so on.
But it sometimes feels like the message isn't getting through to many Notes/Domino ISV's, who want to be one vendor zealots. But it certainly got through to one company...
Proposion Software, run by the savvy and energetic Stephen Walch, has long worked on the integration bleeding edge, facilitating .NET integration with Notes/Domino, as well as integration with a number of Microsoft technologies that I haven't eaven heard of before. And it looks like it is paying off. A quick look at the Microsoft Office Online Solutions Directory shows Proposion with four products. Two are of particular interest to me, including one which I hadn't heard about until today, the Proposion Identity Adapter, which says it allows Sharepoint 2007 to use Domino Directory for authentication and user management. The other I have heard a lot about, the Proposion Portal Adapter, which offers Sharepoint Web Parts to access Notes/Domino data. While Microsoft obviously thinks these support a "migration", Stephen (and I) understand that it supports "coexistence" as well, and coexistence is what customers want and need.
So, Proposion "gets it", and their customers get to have their Domino cake and eat with Sharepoint too, as it were. Do you "get it" yet?
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